Jonathan has expressed his review on Bogle’s “Enough” book. It’s so true and it really caught me up for a while. What’s your take on it? Do you see life like that?
My favorite part of this book is how Bogle acknowledges that his success was largely due to a mixture of luck and the assistance of many other people who believed in him. Too many successful people look back and think they did it all themselves. Sure, they may have worked very hard, but every one of us had help. A loving and supporting parent. A teacher who went the extra mile. A mentor who shared their own experience. Knowing that you didn’t do it alone, makes it easier to stop thinking of only yourself, which helps you find the balance of “enough” that includes thinking of others.
See what Paul Graham has to say about, how one can be successful
I was writing a talk for investors, and I had to explain what to look for in founders. What would someone who was the opposite of hapless be like? They’d be relentlessly resourceful. Not merely relentless. That’s not enough to make things go your way except in a few mostly uninteresting domains. In any interesting domain, the difficulties will be novel. Which means you can’t simply plow through them, because you don’t know initially how hard they are; you don’t know whether you’re about to plow through a block of foam or granite. So you have to be resourceful. You have to have keep trying new things.
Be relentlessly resourceful.
See what Joel Spolsky got to say abt compensation at this article
At Fog Creek Software, every worker at the same level is paid the same salary. And when one gets a raise, they all do
What would happen if you got to work one day, went into the kitchen, and saw a list of your employees’ salaries taped to the fridge? Would you freak out? Would you expect to find half of your staff weeping and the other half waiting with pitchforks outside your office door?
Because salary information is viewed as particularly sensitive, employers often go to great lengths to keep it under wraps. Some companies even make it a fireable offense for employees to compare salaries, or they write something into the standard employment contract prohibiting workers from disclosing their pay. (In the United States, this kind of rule is unenforceable, by the way, but some bosses hope their workers won’t know that.) The trouble with keeping salaries a secret is that it’s usually used as a way to avoid paying people fairly. And that’s not good for employees — or the company.
When my partner and I started Fog Creek Software, we knew that we wanted to create a pay scale that was objective and transparent. As I researched different systems, I found that a lot of employers tried to strike a balance between having a formulaic salary scale and one that was looser by setting a series of salary "ranges" for employees at every level of the organization. But this felt unfair to me. I wanted Fog Creek to have a salary scale that was as objective as possible. A manager would have absolutely no leeway when it came to setting a salary. And there would be only one salary per level.
After some digging, I found a Seattle-area software-consulting firm called Construx that had published on its website the outline of a decent professional ladder system (read about it at construx.com/?nid=244). It reminded me of the old pay system at Microsoft, which had worked pretty well when I was there. We used this model as a rough basis for our system, although we added some flourishes. I posted the first draft on my blog and got tons of great feedback, which I used to write up the second draft. The basic system has remained in place ever since.
In Fog Creek’s system, every employee is assigned a level. Currently, these levels range from 8 (for a summer intern) to 16 (for me). Your level is calculated formulaically based on three factors: experience, scope of responsibility, and skill set. Once we determine your number, you make the same as every other employee at that level.
The experience part is pretty easy: It’s based on the number of years of full-time experience you have in the field you’re working in. No work done while you were still in school counts, and certain types of rote, menial work can never add up to more than a year of experience. If you worked as a receptionist for six years, for example, you aren’t credited with six years of experience; I give you credit for one year.
Scope is pretty easy, too. Are you primarily helping someone else do his or her job? Do you have your own area of responsibility? Or are you running a whole product? We are able to define the scope of most jobs pretty objectively.
Quantifying skill is a little bit harder, but we still find it possible to define a fairly objective continuum from a newbie programmer ("Is learning the basic principles of software engineering; works under close supervision; not expected to write production code") to an expert programmer ("Has consistently had major success during participation in all aspects of small and large projects and has been essential to those projects’ successes").
Once we defined our terms, we created a little chart that assigns a level based on an employee’s experience, skill, and scope (a section of it appears on the previous page, and the whole thing is posted at joelonsoftware.com/articles/ladder.html). Then, we created another chart that lists the base salaries for each level, and that’s how we figure out how much an employee makes.
Once a year, my management team sits down, reviews every employee’s work, and recalculates every employee’s level. Then we look at competitive market salaries using online tools such as Salary.com and Glassdoor.com, and we consider our own knowledge of the job market from the past year of recruiting and make sure that the salaries we have at each level are exactly where we want them to be.
Because everyone at the same level gets the same salary — no fudging — we sometimes run into difficulty. One problem with our system reveals itself when we’re pursuing an employee who wants to negotiate for a higher salary. Sometimes this occurs when we find a great person who is currently being paid a salary that, in our view, is way above market. And sometimes this occurs when a potential hire just expects a reasonable amount of back-and-forth over salary because almost every other employer he has ever worked for maintains ambiguous salary ranges and there is always room to get paid better if you negotiate well. We usually address these situations by guaranteeing the recruit a larger first-year bonus than he would normally get. Here’s the thing: Fog Creek is extremely profitable, and we have a generous profit-sharing plan, so the "guaranteed first-year bonus" is almost always less than the employee’s profit-sharing bonus would have been anyway.
Our system was put to the test over the past eight years when the labor market was tight. It’s easy to see why: Suppose you hire 100 yak drivers at $10 an hour, but then the Tibetan economy heats up, and you have trouble finding more yak drivers. The market rate might rise to $15 an hour. The weak-kneed thing to do is to hire new employees at $15 and hope that the senior people don’t discover that the rookies are making more money than they are.
This is technically called salary inversion — if you’re the kind of person who likes to use self-important HR jargon. Salary inversion can lead to strife within an organization. It can also completely warp the relationships among managers, HR, and employees. This may seem ridiculous and sound apocryphal, but I actually once heard that managers at a major corporation told their key employees to quit and reapply for their old jobs, because the bureaucracy had made it nearly impossible to give them raises that reflected the competitive job market. At Fog Creek, we decided that the right thing to do when the labor market tightens is to give raises to everybody at the same level. This move can be painful and expensive, but the alternative is worse. I don’t know about you, but I’m scared of pitchforks.
I can’t guarantee that our system would hold up if margins were to erode, but I’m pretty sure that employees would be willing to accept slightly lower salaries as long as the system were transparent and fair, and it were clear what you needed to do to move up the ladder.
At the same time, if you hear a lot of griping about salaries, you shouldn’t look just at your system for paying people. One thing I’ve learned from experience is that happy, motivated employees who are doing work they love and feel they are being treated as adults don’t gripe about money unless their pay is egregiously unfair. If you hear a lot of complaints about salaries, I suspect that’s probably a manifestation of a much bigger disease: Your employees aren’t deriving enough personal satisfaction from their work, or they are miserable for other reasons.
It takes a lot of salary to make up for a cruel boss or a prisonlike workplace. And rather than adjusting pay, you might choose to focus on some nonmonetary ways to make employees happy. Happy employees make better products and provide better customer service and will make your company successful and profitable. And success allows you to pay workers better. It’s a virtuous circle, and it has worked for Fog Creek. Let me know if it works for you.
I read this in the Time magazine’s article. I found it very interesting. Though I am not very sure of the tests and its conclusion, I agree with the conclusion (highlighted for convenience). What’s your take on this.
Bosses may be an overbearing breed, but more often than not, you’ve got to admire their business chops. Wouldn’t you love to have that same sense of competence and confidence, that ability to assess tough problems and reach smart solutions on the fly? Guess what? So would they. If you have ever suspected that your boss isn’t actually good enough at what he or she does to deserve the job in the first place, a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that you might be right.
Social psychologists know that one way to be viewed as a leader in any group is simply to act like one. Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say. This works well when leaders know what they’re talking about, but what if they don’t? If someone acts like a boss but thinks like a boob, is that still enough to stay on top? (See the best business deals of 2008.)
To determine just how easily an all-hat-no-cattle leader can take control of employees, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, devised a pair of tests. Cameron Anderson, an associate professor of organizational behavior and industrial relations, along with doctoral candidate Gavin Kilduff, recruited a group of 68 graduate students and divided them into four-person teams. To eliminate the wild card of gender, the teams were either all-male or all-female. Each group was given the task of organizing an imaginary nonprofit environmental organization; the group that did best — as determined by the researchers — would win a $400 prize. While the prize was real, the purported goal wasn’t. What Anderson and Kilduff really wanted to see was how the alpha group members would emerge. (Read "How to Know When the Economy Is Turning Up.")
After the teams performed their work for a fixed amount of time, the members of each group rated one another on both their level of influence on the group and, more important, their level of competence. The work sessions were videotaped, and a group of independent observers performed the same evaluations, as did Anderson and Kilduff. All three sets of judges reached the same conclusions. Consistently, the group members who spoke up the most were rated the highest for such qualities as "general intelligence" and "dependable and self-disciplined." The ones who didn’t speak as much tended to score higher for less desirable traits, including "conventional and uncreative."
"More-dominant individuals achieved influence in their groups in part because they were seen as more competent by fellow group members," Anderson and Kilduff write. (See pictures of Steve Jobs on the job.)
But so what? Maybe they were more competent. Isn’t it possible that people who talk more do so because they simply have more to contribute? To test that, Anderson and Kilduff ran a second study with a new team of volunteers in which the skill being tested was a lot more quantifiable than forming a nonprofit green group. This time it was math. (See entrepreneurs breaking ground in global business.)
Once again, the volunteers were divided into fours in competition for a $400 prize, but now their assigned task was to work as teams to solve computational problems from previous versions of the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT). Before the work began, the participants informed the researchers — but not their team members — of their real-world scores on the math portion of the SAT. When the work was finished, the people who spoke up more were again likelier to be described by peers as leaders and likelier to be rated as math whizzes. What’s more, any speaking up at all seemed to do. Participants earned recognition for being the first to call out an answer, but also for being the second or third — even if all they did was agree with what someone else had said. Merely providing some scrap of information relevant to solving the problem counted too, as long as they did so often enough and confidently enough. (See TIME’s photo-essay "All Cubed In.")
When Anderson and Kilduff checked the participants’ work, however, a lot of pretenders were exposed. Repeatedly, the ones who emerged as leaders and were rated the highest in competence were not the ones who offered the greatest number of correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they’d even be able to. What they did do was offer the most answers — period.
"Dominant individuals behaved in ways that made them appear competent," the researchers write, "above and beyond their actual competence." Troublingly, group members seemed only too willing to follow these underqualified bosses. An overwhelming 94% of the time, the teams used the first answer anyone shouted out — often giving only perfunctory consideration to others that were offered.
None of this comes as much of a shock — at least if you’ve been watching the news. You don’t have to be a former homeowner burned by the housing fiasco or a blue-state voter screaming "I told you so" to agree that the way we pick our leaders is often based on something other than merit. That’s not entirely bad, since no matter how competent bosses are, they still have to have the charisma and confidence to persuade people to follow them. Whether they’re leading from the Oval Office or the corner office, it’s up to the rest of us to watch them closely and make sure they know what they’re doing and where they’re going.
Brazen Careerist says how to lead. I found it soo true, from my experience. What’s your comment
Generation Y has a lot of great traits, but classic, top-down leadership is not one of them. This is not a surprise: Because gen Y is the great teamwork generation. They did book reports in teams, they went to prom in teams, and they are notorious for quitting jobs in teams.
I think effective leadership in today’s workplace is about teamwork and following, not about standing out.
Here are five traits of leadership in the new millennium — traits I try to practice myself:
1. Make yourself a source of information
The key trait in a leader is the bravery to put forth an opinion and maybe be wrong. Jeffrey Kluger, writing in Time magazine, reports research that we value leaders not because they are smarter or right more often, but merely because they speak up. We want to be lead by people who take a shot at the answer – right or wrong. So if you want to be perceived as a leader, speak up. Often.
This means you need opinions. Today news is commodified, which means (newspapers are dying and) the real information we can offer is a layer of opinion and synthesis on top of the news. So you need to take a risk and put out some opinions that matter in order to be seen as leading people. Your peers, rather than some special gatekeeper will determine if the opinions are right or wrong.
2. Expect your ideas to resonate due to merit not rank
Gary Hamel has a great post on his Wall St. Journal blog about the impact of Web 2.0 on the workplace. The first thing he points out is that in the Web 2.0 world, all ideas are on equal footing. Which is to say that your rank doesn’t matter as much as what you put forward.
He writes: “When you post a video to YouTube, no one asks you if you went to film school. When you write a blog, no one cares whether you have a journalism degree. Position, title, and academic degrees—none of the usual status differentiators carry much weight online. On the Web, what counts is not your resume, but what you can contribute.”
3. Get good at following
I’ve been thinking a lot about Barbara Kellerman’s book, Followership: How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders. Kellerman argues that in order to learn how to be a good leader, you need to also understand the art of good following. Her research shows that the best followers have historically paid more attention to their peers than those holding rank above them. So it makes sense that leaders in the new millennium will look to their peers to elevate them rather than doing it by climbing up some external ranking system.
4. Get good at selling from the inside out
You cannot force an idea down peoples’ throats. That top-down sort of leadership disappeared when the corporate ladder disappeared. This means that leadership is all about sales: selling a vision, and a common goal, and making meaningful connections. Leaders do this to convince people to keep going even though there is no promise of a safe future.
Today leaders sell by being part of the team. A great example of this is cheerleaders. Cheerleaders are infamous for being amazing salespeople and part of that is that they know how to work as part of a team instead of barking orders and insisting on being the leader.
5. Be authentic in situations where authenticity is most difficult
Authenticity is the new way of selling –rather than using the force of BS. And the leaders of the new millennium are judged by their ability to convey their true selves. Tony Hsieh, the CEO for Zappos is renowned for maintaining a popular Twitter feed that rings as authentic and fun. Mark Zuckerberg gets into the most trouble when his interviews seem stiff to the point of inauthentic.
One of the best ways develop your own leadership potential is through public speaking training. The best type of training for speakers isn’t to memorize speeches and make rote eye contact, but rather to learn to be your true self in front of people. First you learn to do it in front of a few people – no small feat – and then you learn to do it in front of a lot of people. (I learned this at TAI Resources.)
Of course, you may discover that you are not really a leader. But the best thing about deciding to become a leader is that you learn what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are. And in the new millennium, the distinction between leader and follower is so fluid that the distinction between your strengths and weaknesses is probably more important, anyway.
From getrichslowly
Rules for investment success from an article that Templeton wrote in 1993. In “16 Rules for Investment Success” [PDF], he explains his approach to investing. Some of Templeton’s advice includes:
- Invest — don’t trade or speculate. “The stock market is not a casino, but if you move in and out of stocks every time they move a point or two…the market will be your casino.”
- Remain flexible and open-minded about types of investment. “There are times to buy blue chip stocks, cyclical stocks, corporate bonds, U.S. Treasury instruments, and so on. And there are times to sit on cash…The fact is there is no one kind of investment that is always best.”
- Buy low. “It is extremely difficult to go against the crowd — to buy when everyone else is selling or has sold, to buy when things look darkest…[but] chances are if you buy what everyone is buying you will do so only after it is already overpriced.”
- When buying stocks, search for bargains among quality stocks. “Determining quality in a stock is like reviewing a restaurant. You don’t expect it to be 100% perfect, but before it gets three or four stars you want it to be superior.”
- Diversify. “In stocks and bonds, as in much else, there is safety in numbers.”
- Do your homework or hire wise experts to help you. “People will tell you: Investigate before you invest. Listen to them. Study companies to learn what makes them successful.”
- Don’t panic. “The time to sell is before the crash, not after.”
- Learn from your mistakes. “The only way to avoid mistakes is not to invest — which is the biggest mistake of all…The big difference between those who are successful and those who are not is that successful people learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of others.”
- An investor who has all the answers doesn’t even understand all the questions. “A cocksure approach to investing will lead, probably sooner than later, to disappointment if not outright disaster. Even if we can identify an unchanging handful of investing principles, we cannot apply these rules to an unchanging universe of investments—or an unchanging economic and political environment. Everything is in a constant state of change, and the wise investor recognizes that success is a process of continually seeking answers to new questions.”
- Do not be fearful or negative too often. “Even in the dark ’70s, many professional money managers — and many individual investors too — made money in stocks, especially those of smaller companies. There will, of course, be corrections, perhaps even crashes. But, over time, our studies indicate stocks do go up…and up…and up.”
US News suggests you can hold on to your job by displaying the following qualities:
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Composure. When others freak out, you do not join them.
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Thoroughness. You carry tasks all the way through to their logical conclusions.
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Graciousness. You treat everyone equally well.
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Diligence. You take the time to be careful; you make the effort to be accurate.
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Astuteness. You anticipate things that will go wrong and always have a contingency plan.
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Mastery. You consistently produce high-quality work in a timely fashion.
This seems to jive with the findings in Outliers: The Story of Success
The author comes up with this equation for success:
Ability + hard work + luck/circumstance = success
He defines them as follows:
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Ability: You need a base level of ability (i.e. you need to be "smart enough", but you don’t need any extra smarts/ability above a general proficiency level.)
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Hard work: The one thing that separates the good from the bad — the good spend much more time doing/practicing than the bad (or the not-so-good.)
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Luck/circumstance: Good fortune, your background, your culture, history, etc. — certainly something that none of us can influence.
I happen to read this useful article on networking at CNN
AT EVENTS: WORK THE ROOM
Scout out the scene. A big room full of strangers can be intimidating, whether it’s the cocktail mixer at an industry conference, a corporate retreat, or a networking event. Ease the stress by finding out who the attendees are ahead of time. Ask the organizer to e-mail you the RSVP list or check the registration when you arrive. You can warm up your chatter by finding someone you already know – just make sure you move on and mingle before too long.
Bring a wingman. If you can, invite a colleague along. Ideally, you want someone more outgoing than you who will push you to meet people and maybe talk you up just a bit, says Peter Handal, CEO of Dale Carnegie & Associates, which provides corporate leadership training.
Be unfashionably early. Wouldn’t you rather walk into a room of five people than into one with 50? Get there at the beginning so that you can start a conversation rather than awkwardly join one in progress, says Wendy Gelberg, author of "The Successful Introvert." Arrive early enough and you have a built-in conversation starter: "So, um, I guess we’re the first ones here …" Not exactly the stuff of the Algonquin Round Table, but it’ll do in a pinch.
ONE-ON-ONE: BOND, DON’T BEG
Keep in touch in the good times. Don’t be the one who calls only to unload about how work stinks or how crummy the job market is. The technical term for such a person is "a drag." Get out there when you aren’t searching for a new gig, and it will be easier to get your call returned when you are.
Schedule a lunch. Yep, that meal with your former co-worker counts, even if it was just fun. (Especially if it was fun.) Even if you talked more about your wretched ex-boss than your career. Networking is not a constant series of mini-interviews. It’s a gradual process of building trust with people (maybe not that ex-boss) as well as just letting them know what you are up to these days. Aim for one lunch a week.
Zip it for a minute. Again, you’re building relationships, not interviewing. Ask questions to get your lunch date talking about herself. Who doesn’t like that?
Give now, get later. Networking sounds slimy because we think of it as asking for something. But it’s really a two-way street. Help someone else, and he’ll owe you (or at least think of you) later on. "Very few of us are walking around with jobs in our pockets, but we all have contacts and information we can share," says Gelberg.
ONLINE: KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE
Build a casual network. Sign on, if you haven’t, to a social-networking service like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. "Because interactions aren’t in real time, there’s much less pressure," says Gelberg. The services allow you to be in touch with people without the formalities and hi-how-are-you of an e-mail. And it’s often your more casual contacts who point you to the next job. Just don’t abuse the technology and annoy people. Only "friend" people you’ve met, and remind them of the connection if it’s been a while. A solid network of 50 is better than 1,000 acquaintances.
Get introduced. Know someone who knows someone who could be useful in your career? Ask the mutual friend to make an introduction via a social-networking site. Or search under the "People" tab on LinkedIn to see whether someone in your circle can make a connection to a specific person or company.
Give updates. Toot your horn a bit (it’s easier online, we promise) by regularly adding to your social-networking profile, updating your "status," or even just sending out an e-mail blast. Let people know, for example, if you’re speaking on a panel or attending a conference.
We went to a baseball game today. This is the first time I am into baseball. It was good. Its more like Cricket (given my Indian origin, its a no brainer that I know Cricket), but lot shorter than a 1 day game even (leave alone the test matches). The rules of the game can be learnt from http://www.eteamz.com/baseball/rules/basic/
It was a nice view from where we were. Its a Rangers game. We lost to Royals by 1 run. Still it was lot of fun.
